26 Birthday Cakes I'd Like To Weep Gently Into This Year

Hello, big bad world! It’s almost my birthday! Aging is so fun, and so is thinking about it and having attention drawn to it! After all, there’s so much to celebrate: Moving past the age at which I thought I’d have accomplished pretty much all of my life goals without having accomplished all of said life goals, aging out of my mother’s health insurance, continuing to be too old to drink the way I once drank in order to cope with my existential crises about aging, and no longer being closer to twenty than thirty, for starters! Here’s to becoming 26 in the midst of my infamous #SummerOfSelfSabotage and feeling very great about it.

Honestly, though, I front like I hate birthdays but I’m a Leo so some parts of the whole “growing up” and “becoming an adult” and “Carmen when are you getting your life together thing” really do appeal to me — specifically parties thrown exclusively in my honor, birthday cards I wasn’t expecting you to send, gifts that come in large boxes even if the gift itself is small, telling other people where to meet me and having them actually show up and then probably buy me drinks and food, etc. — which is why despite my perennial terror about wasting my youth I wrote an entire open thread to goad y’all into wishing me a happy birthday.

But I digress. The point here is that in order to stave off my angst about being too old to vomit in the street but too young to die and (unrelated but just for your reference) the crumbling of my moral fiber, I decided this year to find 26 birthday cakes that would make me feel fabulous instead of near to the brink of my irrelevance. I probably won’t bake them, because baking is not in my wheelhouse, but I do like looking at them. (If you bake one for me, I’ll do everything I can to change your world before everything falls apart and I drive into the desert instead of emailing you back.)